Which row will keep Table.Distinct(Table, {"Column"})

Ok, this is pretty weird.

I ran the tests again, but instead of reordering the table using Table.Sort I just entered the data in a different order from the start.

Here are the results:

(For some reason I can't embed images even though I had no such problem yesterday. Sorry if this is harder to follow or the images eventually go down)

Source

Distinct

Reordered Source

Reordered Distinct

Code:

let
    Source = Table.FromRows(Json.Document(Binary.Decompress(Binary.FromText("i45WclLSUUpUitWJVnJEYSUpxcYCAA==", BinaryEncoding.Base64), Compression.Deflate)), let _t = ((type nullable text) meta [Serialized.Text = true]) in type table [a = _t, b = _t]),
    Example = Table.TransformColumnTypes(Source,{{"a", type text}, {"b", type text}}),
    ExampleResult = Table.Distinct(Example, {"b"}),
    ReorderedExample = Table.Sort(Example,{{"a", Order.Ascending}}),
    ReorderedExampleResult = Table.Distinct(ReorderedExample, {"b"})
in
    ReorderedExampleResult

We can easily see that order is indeed important, but that for some reason reordering the table using Table.Sort doesn't make a difference. I found that if we need to, we can use Table.Buffer to make Table.Distinct take into account the changes made by Table.Sort. Here's my third and final test:

Source

Distinct

Reordered Source

Reordered Distinct

Code:

let
    Source = Table.FromRows(Json.Document(Binary.Decompress(Binary.FromText("i45WclTSUUpUitWJVnKCs0BiSUqxsQA=", BinaryEncoding.Base64), Compression.Deflate)), let _t = ((type nullable text) meta [Serialized.Text = true]) in type table [a = _t, b = _t]),
    Example = Table.TransformColumnTypes(Source,{{"a", type text}, {"b", type text}}),
    ExampleResult = Table.Distinct(Example, {"b"}),
    ReorderedExample = Table.Buffer( Table.Sort(Example,{{"a", Order.Descending}}) ),
    ReorderedExampleResult = Table.Distinct(ReorderedExample, {"b"})
in
    ReorderedExampleResult